Fraser Valley could see more flooding, officials say
This article was written by the Canadian Press and was published in the Toronto Star on December 15, 2025.
British Columbia is preparing for another widespread deluge of rain after flooding through the province’s Fraser Valley temporarily shutdown a portion of Highway 1 last week.
Emergency Management Minister Kelly Greene said Sunday that flood and landslide risks in parts of the province will increase with more stormy weather in the forecast, even as floodwaters receded in Abbotsford after heavy rains last week.
Environment Canada issued several rainfall warnings across B.C., including for the Fraser Valley, forecasting up to 80 millimetres of rain in some areas where localized flooding is “likely.”
Agriculture Minister Lana Popham said 56 farms remain under evacuation order, with 13 on alert, as flooded barns led to deaths of chickens on some affected poultry farms.
Connie Chapman with the province’s water management branch said Sunday that flood warnings remain for the Sumas and Chilliwack Rivers, and high stream flow advisories in several other parts of B.C. including Haida Gwaii, the north, central and south coast and on Vancouver Island.
She said the forecast is “less intense” than last week, but officials are still concerned about areas affected by flooding being hit again.
Environment Canada put rainfall warnings in place across British Columbia’s flooddrenched Fraser Valley as another wave of soaking weather hits the region.
Environment Canada said the valley, including Abbotsford, which was inundated by crossborder flooding last week, can expect the new system to bring “significant rain” of up to 80 millimetres with the heaviest downpours expected Monday.
The B.C. government said Sunday that Highway 1 out of Abbotsford was reopened in both directions, but officials said there could be “short notice” closures on some stretches due to flood risk on Highway 5, the Coquihalla Highway, Highway 1 through the Fraser Canyon, and Highway 99 from Cache Creek to Pemberton.
This article was written by Andrea Woo, Nathan Vanderklippe, and Patrick White, and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 12, 2025.
An aerial view shows water inundating the Huntington neighbourhood of Abbotsford, B.C., on Thursday after an atmospheric river brought heavy rainfall across the region. Such scenes left some in the province fearing a repeat of 2021’s catastrophic floods.
Rising rivers submerge towns in neighbouring Washington, prompting statewide emergency
Hundreds of people and countless livestock in British Columbia’s agricultural heartland were displaced Thursday after torrential rainfall and historic flooding that forced mass evacuations in Washington State and swept north across the border.
For those in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, the scenes of swollen rivers, washed-out highways and flooded farmland stirred uncomfortable memories of the catastrophic flood of November, 2021, the province’s costliest natural disaster.
While this week’s event has not reached that level of destruction, officials warned Thursday that water levels were expected to rise into the night and that they were preparing for difficult days ahead.
“I want to emphasize that we are not yet through this emergency,” B.C. Emergency Management Minister Kelly Greene said in a news conference in Vancouver.
The flooding is the result of a powerful atmospheric river, an ocean-crossing weather phenomenon originating in the tropics or subtropics, commonly seen on the West Coast. Since Tuesday, between 90 and 150 millimetres of rain fell over southern B.C., officials said.
Washington State has borne the brunt of the torrential downpour. In the state’s northwest, 24-hour rainfall totals exceeded 130 millimetres in some areas. Authorities ordered the evacuation of residents in the 100-year flood plain along the Skagit River, which flows down from the northern Cascades and reaches saltwater roughly 80 kilometres north of Seattle.
Roughly 75,000 people live in those lowlying areas, around the cities of Burlington and Mount Vernon – both located on the Interstate 5 corridor that is commonly travelled by Canadians.
Washington Governor Bob Ferguson described “intense flooding” on social media and signed a statewide emergency declaration.
“The severity of the flooding on the Skagit River is something that no local resident has ever experienced,” he wrote Thursday afternoon.
In B.C., every major highway connecting the Lower Mainland and the Interior was closed late Wednesday night because of falling rock and debris, as well as avalanche hazards. Some highways remained closed Thursday evening.
As of Thursday, 453 properties in Abbotsford, which is located just north of the border, were ordered to evacuate, while 1,069 were on evacuation alert.
As well, B.C. Agriculture Minister Lana Popham said that 66 farms with livestock have been registered under evacuation order, and 99 farms with livestock under evacuation alert.
Ms. Popham, who held the same role during the 2021 flood, said the province learned a lot from that disaster, in which hundreds of thousands of farm animals died. Dairy farmers now have a full-time emergency management specialist, she cited as an example, and have practised for scenarios just like this. Still, they are worried.
“I can hear the strain in their voices, and I know that they’re replaying some of the events that happened last time,” Ms. Popham said.
The Nooksack River, which topped its banks in Washington State on Wednesday afternoon and began flowing north across the border, peaked overnight and began to recede.
However, water was expected to continue flowing into B.C.’s Sumas Prairie late into Thursday evening and potentially overnight, said David Campbell, the head of B.C.’s River Forecast Centre.
“We’re really cautioning that while some areas are improving, in through the valley, the Sumas particularly, we do expect to see the potential for ongoing, challenging conditions as we go through the day,” he said.
Mr. Campbell added that another stormy system is forecast to start Sunday, but that it is too early to know its risks.
U.S. monitoring records showed that the Nooksack River at 3 a.m. Thursday briefly exceeded the levels it reached in 2021. However, Connie Chapman, executive director of the provincial Water Management Branch, said other variables such as a shorter duration of rainfall produced a different result.
Mike Winbow, who lives in a trailer in Abbotsford, spent much of the night taking periodic measurements along the Sumas Canal and posting them to Facebook. He was worried about a repeat of 2021, when police rapped on his door and told him to evacuate in the dead of night. At the time, the area was a “sea of water,” he said, and the canal was nearly spilling over its dike.
“It was freaky,” he said. “There were jetboats going down the middle of the freeway.”
The water was much lower Wednesday night, about 12-15 feet short of the dike, Mr. Winbow said. Still, he wasn’t taking any risks.
At one point in the night, he blasted an air horn to wake up people in neighbouring RVs and let them know an evacuation order had been issued for much of the surrounding Sumas Prairie. Only later did he realize the rest stop wasn’t included in the order.
“The authorities seemed better prepared this time around,” he added. “We had search and rescue come by last night to check on things. It was much calmer than 2021.”
Meanwhile, in Washington State, water levels on the Skykomish and Snohomish rivers approached record levels.
In Sumas, Wash., a border town just south of Abbotsford, “probably 100 per cent” of the downtown is underwater, Mayor Bruce Bosch said in an interview. “It’s looking like close to the ’21 flood.”
Local crews attempted to block floodwaters with sandbags, “but it didn’t stop it,” Mr. Bosch said.
In Everson, a Washington farming community where the Nooksack commonly overflows its banks, “it’s worse” than four years ago, Mayor John Perry said.
“Our west side of town got hit a lot harder than it did in ’21. We saw four to six inches more water in the streets and in our buildings.”
Mr. Ferguson, the Governor, called on the U.S. federal government to issue an expedited emergency declaration, which he said would allow the state to access additional safety measures and federal resources “to address the extremely challenging situation.“
The state mobilized several hundred members of the National Guard to help. They will likely be sent to the Skagit River area, according to dispatch instructions included in a video posted by the Washington National Guard.
The effects of “catastrophic” flooding are likely to continue through Friday, the U.S. National Weather Service said Thursday. It said waters are likely to pour over levees and landslides remain possible.
This article was written by Matt Elliott and was published in the Toronto Star on December 9, 2025.
Bike Share Toronto is riding high. With more than 1,000 stations and 10,000 bikes now in the system, ridership is expected to hit 8.1 million trips this year. It’ll be another alltime high: a 17 per cent increase over last year and more than three times higher than the prepandemic number of rides in 2019.
And so the Toronto Parking Authority (TPA), operators of the service, are like proud parents at a school Christmas concert, gushing about the performance of the program they’ve nurtured since infancy. In a report set to go before its recently reconstituted board this Friday, the TPA says Bike Share has “exceeded our performance expectations” and is “well positioned to be scaled at an accelerated rate and become an indispensable mode of transportation for the city.”
Despite the effusive praise, the TPA’s latest report left me worried about Bike Share’s future. Decisions are looming that could stop the ridinghigh momentum — and maybe even put a proverbial stick in the spokes of the city’s biggest recent cycling success story.
Here’s the problem. The TPA report, after justifiably bragging about its recent success, spends much of the rest of the document laying out ways to extract more money from the Bike Share riders who have contributed to that success.
That includes “new revenue streams” like “loyalty programs, digital advertising networks, feature upsells and advanced reservations.” It reads like a road map that could easily lead to what the tech writer Cory Doctorow has colourfully called “enshittification” — the process whereby online platforms and services decline over time as they change from focusing on what benefits users to what benefits their bottom line.
You know it when you see it. It usually starts when a service that previously offered a reasonable price and a good user experience begins constantly trying to sell you on their Premium Extra VIP Plus program while also showing unskippable ads for weightloss drugs.
This decline can be an insidious process that starts with good intentions. For instance, Bike Share has had problems with dock and bike availability, especially at peak times of day. From the TPA’s perspective, allowing people to reserve a bike in advance for a small fee might seem like a good way to ease frustration. For users, however, a much better approach would be to add more bikes and docks in areas with high demand.
But that wouldn’t create a new revenue stream, and revenue seems to be the TPA’s prime directive. As another example, the report also spends a lot of time talking about the expansion of electric bikes across the city. It’s hoping to expand the number of electric charging docks from about 1,375 today to 3,035 in 2030.
Sounds like good news for those of us who break a sweat trying to bike uphill and like the assist offered by ebikes, but it’s impossible to miss that part of the motivation here seems to be to shift more riders to a priceperminute model.
Under Bike Share’s current model, members who pay the basic $105 a year fee can take an unlimited number of rides of 30 minutes or less using the pedalpowered bikes for no extra cost. The ebikes, on the other hand, cost members 10 cents per minute on top of the annual fee.
The TPA’s report says, rather bluntly, that this means the ebikes are “more productive” than the pedal bikes, and more ebikes will help bring the perride subsidy down from about 39 cents a ride today to close to breakeven in 2030.
But the report doesn’t spend much time considering whether breakeven should really be the goal, especially in the near term.
It’s important to remember that the perride subsidy per Bike Share today is already much lower than the $2.62 pertrip subsidy the TTC reported last year. Every Bike Share trip that replaces a transit trip is money saved for city hall.
And while it’s hard to pin down the total value of various public subsidies spent to benefit drivers in the GTA, we know it’s a heck of a lot. As a point of comparison, the $3.6 billion being spent on rehabilitating the Gardiner Expressway — just one of the many highway projects receiving billions of dollars these days — would cover Bike Share’s annual expansion budget for about 450 years. Good enough for our greatgrandchildren and their greatgrandchildren — and probably some cyborg and xenomorph cyclists too.
Given the low costs relative to its transportation peers, it’s not clear to me why Bike Share should need to focus on revenue generation and breakeven operations when other forms of mobility are treated like public services worthy of continued public investment.
There’s still time to shift gears. Last month, Mayor Olivia Chow was successful with a surprise motion to get Toronto council to disband the TPA board. Gone are the lawyers, economists and accountants. In their place is an interim board made up entirely of city hall staffers like city manager Paul Johnson. I hope the new board’s experience as public servants leads them to reconsider Bike Share’s longterm goals — and to ask whether it really makes sense for it to operate like a tech platform chasing extra revenue.
Bike Share has incredible momentum. It’d be a shame if its remarkable ride were spoiled by rolling into a hazard ahead, like a pile of, uh, well, you know.
This article was written by Jenn Thornhill Verma and was published in the Globe & Mail on December 4, 2025.
Mr. Hawkins developed a specialized camera rig to film dangerous rescue missions of North American right whales. His footage can be seen on The Wild Ones, a wildlife documentary now screening on Apple TV.
This is the seventh and final story in a series on Canada-U.S. cross-border measures to protect North Atlantic right whales.
North Atlantic right whales are teetering dangerously close to functional extinction – the point at which there are too few animals to recover – yet they are dying from known problems with known solutions.
Researchers know what the risks are: mostly fishing gear entanglements and vessel strikes, but also ocean noise pollution caused by human activity and climate change shifting where the whales feed. Policy makers know what to do: Remove fishing lines to reduce the risk of entanglement, reroute and slow vessels, and implement these protections wherever the whales travel.
Yet despite this knowledge, only 384 North Atlantic right whales remain, including 72 mothers. While these numbers represent slow growth in recent years, the population is a fraction of historic abundance.
The gap between knowing and doing has frustrated scientists for decades. “We’re trained to get the facts, show the facts, prove with the facts,” says Nadine Lysiak, a wildlife and ocean health research scientist at the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life. “But I just don’t think we live in a society where that matters as much as we want it to.”
Michael J. Moore, a veterinary scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, puts it more bluntly: “The bottom line is the bottom line: It’s all about money.” While a “conservation lobby” pushes for measures to reduce whale deaths, Dr. Moore says a stronger “consumer lobby unintentionally is pushing exactly the opposite direction. They want to have more ships, faster ships, more deliveries and more seafood.”
Yet public opinion offers hope. A 2024 Ipsos poll of 1,053 Americans, commissioned by Oceana, an international ocean conservation organization, found that 86 per cent of U.S. voters believe right whales should be protected from human-caused threats. In Canada, a 2019 unpublished Abacus Data survey of 1,850 Canadians, commissioned by Oceana Canada, found that despite 68 per cent of respondents knowing nothing about right whales, 96 per cent said it was important that the government of Canada protect them.
The poll findings suggest that the disconnect is not about public interest – it’s about translating that into meaningful change.
The gap between knowing and doing has been a throughline of the Entangled series. Over the past year, supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network, The Globe investigated the plight of North Atlantic right whales – drawing on more than 60 scientific studies, government reports and datasets, nearly 50 interviews with scientists, policy makers, fishers and advocates, and records tracking 32 individual whales. The series examined the threats – entanglements, vessel strikes, habitat shifts and ocean noise – and the policies to address them. Now, as the series closes, we return to where we began: the people working to change the outcome.
The Globe spoke to six people – including scientists, educators and rescue organizers – who have taken up action to protect the right whale to understand what compels them and what it will take to close the implementation gap.
1. SEE THE WHALES AS RELATIVES
Bradford Lopes of the Aquinnah Wôpanâak tribe in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., draws on oral traditions that tell of Moshup, a benevolent giant who transformed his children into killer whales to protect them from the harm of settlers.
For Wôpanâak people, right whales aren’t just endangered animals – they’re family.
“It is devastating in a way that I struggle to explain,” Mr. Lopes says. “It’s no different than losing your own family. It’s heartbreaking. Because they’re our cousins.”
Last year, Mr. Lopes held a workshop on the Wôpanâak’s connection to the whales at the North Atlantic Right Whales Consortium, the largest gathering of right whale researchers.
The Wôpanâak have fought to remain in their homelands despite centuries of displacement and cultural erasure. “When I see their story, I see a story that we not only know spiritually, but we know historically.”
The parallel runs deep. “This is something that we’ve experienced with Wôpanâak people in lots of ways. I can relate to that. There’s a very visceral kind of relation there.”
But Mr. Lopes also finds hope in the whales’ persistence. “The other thing I see reflected is their continuance, this fight, this spirit, about not disappearing from their home waters and to hang on.”
As Mr. Lopes told The Globe in April when discussing one of last season’s mothers, Nauset (known under the identification code #2413 in the North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog): “I see these mothers as I see our own mothers. I see our grandmothers, and I see that fight,” he said. “The reason why we’re still here as Wôpanâak people is our women – the strength they’ve had and the fight they’ve had, but also the vision they’ve had.”
This world view – whales as relatives rather than resources – represents what Dr. Moore calls the “only hope” for the species. “There has to be a fundamental change in how we view these animals,” Dr. Moore argues.
2. START YOUNG AND STAY CURIOUS
In the small coastal town of Castine, Maine, middle school science teacher Bill McWeeny posed a simple question to his students in 2004: “How’d you like to help a really big animal?”
“I introduced them to the right whales,” Mr. McWeeny recalls. “And that was that.”
Mr. McWeeny’s teaching philosophy is built on experience rather than textbooks. He brought researchers into the classroom and took his students – who called themselves “The Calvineers” after Calvin (#2223) the right whale – to scientific conferences.
For student Molly McEntee, one of the first Calvineers, the pivotal moment came on a whale-watching trip to the Bay of Fundy in Grade 8.
“We’d already spent two years talking about them and learning about them, and it was just really exciting to see them in real life,” she says.
Dr. McEntee is now a marine biologist studying elephant seals in California.
The Calvineers didn’t just study whales – they took action. “Once we had the facts like Calvin’s mother was killed by a ship, then we could advocate for changing shipping lanes,” Mr. McWeeny says. (Advocacy had worked before: As The Globe reported in June, Transport Canada rerouted Bay of Fundy vessel traffic around the Grand Manan Basin in 2003, marking the first time in International Maritime Organization history that shipping lanes were moved to protect a marine mammal species.)
The students wrote letters to lawmakers, their youth giving them unique power as messengers. “You get a bunch of kids up there who have done their homework, who do not have the agenda that adults have, and they’re saying all the same conservation messages – it just hits different,” Dr. McEntee says.
Twenty years on, the legacy extends far beyond the few students who took up ocean conservation vocations. “This small group of kids at this small school is, over the years, accumulating into a lot of people in the state who really know more about this than most adults,” Dr. McEntee says.
3. UNDERSTAND THAT NEWS MEDIA SHAPES POLICY
As a PhD student at the University of South Carolina, Amadi Afua Sefah-Twerefour initially planned to study how risks to North Atlantic right whales differ across their various habitats, having previously studied oceanography and fisheries in her home country of Ghana, and ocean engineering in South Korea. But as she dug deeper into her research, she realized something crucial was missing.
“If the main risk is from human activities, then there’s a whole new side to this – what compels social change?” she asks. That realization led her to pivot to analyzing how news coverage shapes public understanding and policy response.
“We understand the facts. We are still learning a lot more about the species. But we realize there’s still a disconnect in our efforts and how effective they are,” she says.
Ms. Sefah-Twerefour’s research, the findings of which are not yet published but currently in peer review, scraped tens of thousands of news articles since 2000 about right whales globally, creating a database that tracks volume of coverage, how stories are framed and when they appear relative to key policy decisions.
“Even if there are diverse opinions or people on opposite sides, the media can actually be that connecting agent,” she said, adding that journalism can point to workable solutions.
Coverage that crosses borders (right whales migrate between U.S. calving grounds and Canadian feeding grounds) while rare, is especially important, Ms. Sefah-Twerefour says.
“Even if one country is able to be excellent at protecting the species, it eventually is watered down if the other is not.”
Despite never having seen a right whale, Ms. Sefah-Twerefour can name individual whales such as Punctuation (#1281) and Clipper (#3450), both dead – their stories burned into her memory through repeated news media coverage. One image particularly haunts her: the 2021 calf of Infinity (#3230), struck and killed by a vessel off Florida’s coast in February that year. “I keep seeing the images of that calf with marks across the back.”
4. BEAR WITNESS AND DOCUMENT THE REALITY
Nick Hawkins started as a whalewatching tour guide in his 20s on the Bay of Fundy. Now a conservation filmmaker based in Fredericton, he’s spent nearly a decade developing techniques to safely film right whales – work that resulted in unprecedented footage of a successful disentanglement for Apple TV’s wildlife documentary The Wild Ones, released this year.
The journey began with a moment Mr. Hawkins cannot forget. In 2019, he got a call that a dead whale, Punctuation (#1281), had been towed to a remote beach for necropsy.
“I had never seen a whale like that. Despite being around whales for years, there’s a big difference in seeing it out of the water compared to on the surface.”
Standing next to it, seeing the whale lice still moving, the baleen (the keratin filter-feeding “teeth” in the whale’s mouth), the eye – “it’s like standing next to this completely alien creature.” That encounter changed his perception.
Mr. Hawkins recognized early that “there wasn’t really any highquality footage of North Atlantic
From the ocean to the classroom, and from Atlantic Canada to the U.S. South, these advocates are finding ways to save a species before it vanishes
right whales. They live in remote areas. Underwater isn’t an option [because of permits]. And that was a real problem.” Researchers had so far collected footage, but it did not meet the broadcast standards necessary for reaching broad audiences.
The solution required years of work: buying a boat capable of reaching whales 30 nautical miles offshore, mastering both seamanship and whale behaviour, and lobbying government to acquire species at risk permits in order to document the whales that had never been granted to a filmmaker before. He designed camera systems that could withstand being soaked on a bouncing boat while flying drones and managing audio – all solo. He also became a trained whale disentangler through the Campobello Whale Rescue Team course, a requirement for anyone on the rescue boat.
It took three summers before all conditions aligned – finding the whale (the yearling Athena, then known as #5312), calm seas and a successful rescue.
The danger of disentangling a whale is real. “It’s a scary thing to be that close to an animal that weighs 40 to 80 tonnes, and that animal is distressed and scared, and it does not want you there,” he says.
His drone work proved to have unexpected benefits beyond filming. Flying above the whale, he could tell the rescue team “it’s right there, it’s crossing under the boat, it’s going to port, it’s going to starboard.” This allowed perfect positioning. “It’s a matter of inches. When that whale comes up, you gun the boat in, the cutter reaches [the line] – it’s inches that make the difference.”
Now Mr. Hawkins is helping train others to use drones in rescues. “The drone is one of, if not the most important tool in whale rescue, other than the cutting tool,” he says. But he’s careful about credit: “The real heroes are the whale rescuers. I’ve been an asset to them. It’s one more tool in the tool box.”
5. LEARN TO CO-EXIST – FROM SETTING TRAPS TO SETTING WHALES FREE
When the Atlantic cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s, Mackie Greene, then only 12, found himself adrift. He had spent his childhood summers fishing the waters around Campobello Island, N.B. “There were a few boats whale watching around here, so I got a little boat and started myself.”
For 26 years, Mr. Greene ran whale-watching tours. On the water, he witnessed something troubling – whales tangled in fishing gear, suffering, with no organized response to help.
Mr. Greene understood better than most that fishermen were not villains in this story. “There’s not a fisherman out there that ever wants to catch a whale,” he says. “He’s losing his gear, he’s losing his catch, he’s going to waste time looking for his gear.
It’s just a nightmare for the fishermen to catch a whale.”
Mr. Greene first encountered whale rescue after he was sent by the province to Cape Cod’s Center for Coastal Studies. But he credits his fishing background most – years of handling rope and reading the water – for preparing him to rescue whales.
In 2002, Mr. Greene and fellow fisherman Joseph (Joe) Howlett co-founded the Campobello Whale Rescue Team at the Canadian Whale Institute as volunteers with minimal government support. Their approach stood out: “Our motto has always been fishermen helping fishermen. We’re not there to condemn the fishermen. We’re there to help them,” says Mr. Greene, now the director of whale rescue at the Canadian Whale Institute.
The emotional rewards made the risks worthwhile: “When you set a whale free, there’s just no feeling like it. I always say it feels like you can jump out of the boat and run home.”
But there was also heartbreak if a rescue attempt fails: “When you don’t get a whale disentangled, it’s that long, quiet ride home.”
In 2017, Mr. Howlett, 59, was fatally struck in the head by a right whale’s tail immediately after freeing the female whale (#4123) from fishing gear. “Joe’s funeral was the biggest funeral Campobello has ever seen,” Mr. Greene remembers. “The church was solid full. Everybody loved Joe.”
After an extensive investigation, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans implemented sweeping safety reforms in 2018. Responders who had been volunteers now receive paid positions and insurance coverage. The department also developed national procedures for federal fishery officers during disentanglement operations and created specialized training for marine mammal response teams.
Today, Mr. Greene is one of only a handful of people in the country who can lead a whale disentanglement. On July 10, 2024, seven years to the day when Mr. Howlett died, the Campobello team successfully disentangled Athena (#5312) in the Gulf of St. Lawrence – the same whale whose rescue Mr. Hawkins filmed.
The responsibility weighs on Mr. Greene, but also fills him with purpose. “These whales are so endangered right now, with just 70 breeding females, every one we can save really makes a big difference,” he says.
6. MEET PEOPLE WHERE THEY ARE – AT THE MARINA
At seven years old, Lydia (Liddy) Clever was fed up with the trash littering the beaches of Tybee Island in Chatham County, Ga. Georgia’s easternmost point, Tybee is a popular destination where beachgoers flock to its white sand shores – the same shores that serve as critical habitat for loggerhead sea turtles, manatees and the calving grounds for the North Atlantic right whale.
Liddy repurposed the collected debris from the beach – plastic bags and other trash – into braided bracelets to keep them out of the ocean. But she realized she could help stop the source of trash before it reached the sea by working with schools. She started “Tidy Tuesdays” at her elementary school, where half her class would pick up trash during recess one week, and the other half the next.
That’s when Liddy, now 11 years old, founded her non-profit, Save Sea Life.
“Our mission is to educate kids at a young age to love the ocean so that when they get older, they don’t destroy it,” Liddy says.
In February, 2021, what washed up on Tybee’s shores moved Liddy to expand her mission: a right whale calf, the offspring of Infinity (#3230), struck and killed by a recreational vessel. “That’s when I really started getting into it, because not only big cargo ships are hurting right whales – small boats hurt them too,” she says.
This past year, Liddy and her mother visited roughly half the marinas in and around Savannah, Ga., to survey boaters about their awareness of right whales. “It was really awesome to see how many boaters did know about them,” she says.
But her findings also revealed a dangerous gap: While more boaters than expected had heard of the species, few understood how to identify them or what to do if they encountered one. That knowledge gap is particularly perilous in Georgia and northern Florida – the only known calving grounds for North Atlantic right whales – where mothers and newborns are most vulnerable to vessel strikes.
To help close that gap, Liddy is working with local government to distribute educational flyers when boats are registered – information “to tell them what to look for in the North Atlantic right whale and who to call if they do see one, how to stay away from them,” she says.
Liddy presented her research at this year’s North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium meeting.
Saving a species is a big job, but as Liddy insists, “No act is too small and you’re never too young to make a big difference.”
This story is part of a series produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network.
Opposition is stirring after PM’s agreement with Alberta
This article was written by Alessia Passafiume and was published in the Toronto Star on December 3, 2025.
OTTAWA For some First Nations leaders, the prospect of conflict with provincial and federal governments over plans to send another pipeline to the B.C. coast brings back vivid memories of years past.
For many First Nations youth, it’s a whole new call to action.
“My ancestors — all the ancestors of every First Nations person here in what is now called British Columbia — have stories about our people having to stand on the front lines, rain or shine,” said Katisha Paul, the youth representative for the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and cochair for the United Nations’ Global Indigenous Youth Caucus.
“It’s our responsibility to continue on this journey.”
Longtime Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs Grand Chief Stewart Phillip has been around for many of those acts of resistance. He was for years one of the public faces of Indigenous protests against the failed Northern Gateway pipeline project and other resource extraction projects he said threatened his community’s way of life.
That opposition is stirring again, after Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith signed a memorandum of understanding last week that sets the stage for a pipeline to B.C.’s coast.
Phillip, who represents more than 100 chiefs in the province, said conflicts over oil pipelines have become “ritualized” in B.C. — a ritual he’s come to know well.
He said the current pipeline debate is in the first stage now — the stage where politicians attempt to sway public opinion. Carney’s government has stumbled out of the gate by leaving First Nations out of the loop, he said.
“The First Nations in British Columbia are completely outraged that there was no effort whatsoever made to consult with First Nations that will be impacted by a pipeline project to coastal waters,” Phillip told The Canadian Press.
“We will not stand idly by while governments collude behind closed doors and come up with ludicrous notions of attempting to get yet another fossil fuel pipeline to coastal waters,” he added, calling the agreement between Ottawa and Alberta
“the most egregious dismissal of our constitutional and legal rights.”
That agreement commits the two governments to working toward building an oil pipeline to the West Coast — and opens the door to changes to the coastal tanker ban.
The agreement says Ottawa’s commitment is contingent on the pipeline being approved as a project of national interest, and on the project providing “opportunities for Indigenous coownership and shared economic benefits.”
Despite that vague promise of Indigenous coownership, no First Nations leaders were consulted on what the memorandum of understanding would look like — not even those who are open to the idea of one.
The Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations, whose members cover vast swaths of the three Prairie provinces, said in a media statement Friday it was “disappointed” by First Nations’ exclusion from the pipeline talks and insisted they must have a seat at the table when decisions are made that affect their people.
“Treaty No. 6 Nations are the only rights holders on this land — there would be no Alberta without treaty. It is unacceptable that we need to request this. There can be nothing for us, without us,” the group wrote in a media statement.
“Despite this, we are looking forward to the opportunity to be included as partowners in nationbuilding projects moving forward,” the group said, adding the memorandum of understanding offers “an opportunity for First Nations to be included in economic ventures that will provide longlasting equity for our communities.”
Merle Alexander, an Indigenous resource lawyer based in Victoria, said First Nations’ right to be consulted on government actions that might affect treaty rights — the socalled “duty to consult” affirmed by the Supreme Court — wasn’t invoked by the agreement between Alberta and the federal government.
But it won’t take long for the current pipeline push to trigger the duty to consult, he said — especially if the project is referred to Ottawa’s new Major Projects Office.
Alexander said the rights of one First Nation cannot trump those of another under the law and the duty to consult does not cease to exist simply because a project has one or more Indigenous communities backing it.
“It’s all going to come down to whether or not the federal government actually does fulfil the duty to consult in a vigorous way,” he said.
Alexander said after First Nations went to court to challenge the Trans Mountain consultation process, the federal government introduced a new process less vulnerable to court challenges. He said that might make it difficult for First Nations opposed to a new pipeline to argue governments and industry didn’t fulfil the duty to consult.
“First Nations need to think outside the box in terms of different legal strategies,” Alexander said, citing the unsettled question of Aboriginal title, the government’s legal term, along the pipeline’s corridor.
While no one knows yet which route the pipeline might take — since the project doesn’t even have a private sector backer yet — any established Aboriginal title along the path would change the standard of consultation from the low end of the spectrum to something more like consent, he said.
“There’s all this conversation about `First Nations don’t have veto rights,’ but that assumes they don’t have Aboriginal title,” Alexander said.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak acknowledged Canada is facing uncertain economic times, but said the push to deal with that has limits.
“Canada can create all the MOUs, projects offices and advisory groups (it wants), but chiefs will be united — and are united — when it comes to the approval of projects on First Nations lands. There will be no getting around rightsholders,” she said.
For Paul, the fact Indigenous communities are being forced into another debate about pipelines is made worse by the Carney government’s lack of consultation to date.
“Find a new adviser, because this system is not working,” Paul said, when asked what advice she’d give the prime minister if they met face to face.
This article was written by Padang Sidempuan and was published in the Glove & Mail on December 2, 2025.
A local resident, Syafrizal, 62, gestures as he visits his parents’ house, which collapsed after being hit by deadly flash floods after heavy rains in Palembayan, Agam regency, West Sumatra province, Indonesia, on Monday.
Indonesia’s president told survivors of last week’s devastating floods that help was arriving to those in need Monday as Asian governments scaled up their responses to a disaster that has left more than 1,000 dead in three countries.
Hundreds more are missing following flooding and landslides in the past week, which killed at least 604 people in Indonesia, 366 in Sri Lanka and 176 in Thailand, authorities said.
Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto pledged to rebuild infrastructure while visiting areas impacted by floods and landslides on Sumatra island that left thousands homeless and 464 people missing as of Monday.
Some areas of Indonesia remained unreachable Monday after the disaster damaged roads and downed communications lines, with residents in impacted areas relying on aircraft delivering supplies. Flooding displaced 290,700 people in North Sumatra, West Sumatra and Aceh provinces, the National Disaster Management Agency said.
Mr. Prabowo, who visited devastated provinces of North Sumatra, West Sumatra and Aceh on Monday, said the government’s response is reaching those in need.
“We need to confront climate change effectively,” Mr. Prabowo told reporters after visiting survivors in North Sumatra. “Local governments must take a significant role in safeguarding the environment and preparing for the extreme weather conditions that will arise from future climate change.”
He vowed to help affected families rebuild houses that were flattened or swept away by floods. During a meeting with displaced people under tents in West Sumatra’s Padang Pariaman district, Mr. Prabowo said they would “not face the burden of this disaster alone.”
Mr. Prabowo also met with hundreds of survivors who fled to a government shelter in Aceh’s Kutacane district.
Sri Lanka authorities said Monday that rescuers are still searching for 367 missing people. About 218,000 people are housed in temporary shelters after being battered in the past week downpours that flooded homes, fields and roads and triggered landslides, primarily in the tea-growing central hill country.
In Thailand, the first batch of compensation payments are set to be distributed Monday, beginning with 239 million baht for 26,000 people, government spokesperson Siripong Angkasakulkiat said.
He said authorities on Monday worked to clean up streets and restore infrastructure including water and electricity in the southern part of the country, where severe flooding affected more than 1.5 million households and 3.9 million people.
The Interior Ministry will set up public kitchens to provide freshly cooked food for affected residents, he said.
This article was written by Ben Kritz and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 29, 2025.
Unpredictable temperatures have caused an evolution in designing and buying outerwear for the winter, Ben Kriz writes
If you waited longer than usual to finally buy a winter coat, you’re not alone. With colder weather and snowfall arriving later in the season, retailers say Canadians are putting off their parka purchases.
In the past, buying a winter parka felt inevitable. Now, uncertainty makes it feel optional – even like a gamble. With Canada’s average winter temperature warming by 3.6 C since 1948, and cold snaps becoming more unpredictable, designing and buying for the season has become more complex, forcing the outerwear market to adapt by displaying winter parkas later in the season and offering coats that work for fluctuating temperatures.
Alex Binette, a Toronto-based outerwear buyer for Harry Rosen, has seen these factors affect when stores order their coats and which styles they carry. “We typically won’t bring in parkas until November now, whereas before it seemed like people were shopping earlier, anticipating the rush and buying them even in the summer,” he said. “Now that doesn’t really happen any more.”
Binette noted that even after Boxing Day, when sales hit and the temperature typically drops, outerwear sales fall significantly – perhaps because of postholiday belt-tightening, he speculated, or optimistic hopes for an early spring. This shift means that customers are buying regularprice outerwear almost exclusively in November and December, putting added pressure on retailers to hit sales targets before the end of the year.
As the price of winter jackets – already high to begin with – has increased, much like everything else in recent years, cost plays heavily on consumers’ minds. While outerwear sales may slump after Boxing Day, Binette said that cruise and resort wear sales around the same time are high. “What we hear from our customers is: ‘I don’t want to buy a parka; I’d rather spend money on vacation,’ ” he said.
To adapt, Harry Rosen has leaned into hybrid styles that function as both sweaters and outerwear, which have a longer selling window, Binette said. These include pieces with down-filled fronts and knit sleeves.
Brands predominantly known for their outerwear, such as Canada Goose, Mackage and Arc’teryx, have also evolved in response.
Binette points to a bestseller from Moose Knuckles this season: a cotton fleece zip-up hoodie that isn’t weatherproof but that customers are wearing as outerwear. “Wearing a chunky, heavygauge sweater as outerwear is the new thing for September, October, even parts of November,” he said.
The shift isn’t just practical, it’s psychological. Shoppers generally delay big purchases and buy more reactively, according to David Hardisty, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia.
When cold weather arrives later, consumers simply feel less urgency, he said.
“You see this with other products too, like road salt,” Hardisty said. “People don’t stock up early – they wait until the first freeze and then suddenly it’s sold out everywhere.”
People buy when they need something, he said. “So if it’s getting colder later, people naturally buy coats later.”
That dynamic favours brands offering lighter, versatile pieces that work across fluctuating temperatures. As Hardisty put it, “people focus even more on the present when the future feels uncertain.”
To weather this change in consumer mindset, brands are investing in more versatile designs. Canada Goose signalled this shift by hiring French fashion designer Haider Ackermann in 2024 as its first-ever creative director, along with the recent opening of a sleek flagship store on Paris’s Champs-Élysées. A highly respected name in fashion, Ackermann’s hiring indicates the company’s intent to shift from utilitarian outerwear to a more diverse brand with fashion credibility in more categories. You can see this in their latest collection which features a variety of layers from tees to graphic hoodies and shorts.
Moose Knuckles has followed suit, this month bringing in a new creative team with experience at Stüssy, Comme des Garçons and Moncler – brands known for full collections and high design rather than single-purpose outerwear.
These moves reflect a broader industry pivot: Outerwear is no longer just extremecold gear, but a category that blends technical performance with fashion appeal. Montreal-based brand Kanuk exemplifies this recent trend. Once defined almost entirely by its heavy-duty winter parkas, Kanuk now offers lighter, more adaptable and more fashion-driven pieces without abandoning its cold-weather roots.
Kanuk president Elisa Dahan said the idea was to go back to the brand’s ethos of country living from its founding in 1974.
“It was rooted in leisure activities and being close to nature, a whole lifestyle as opposed to just a winter parka,” she said. The brand’s latest collections reflect that shift, with denim overshirts, jeans and chunky knits alongside its winter staples.
Current designs include jackets with zipoff sleeves, which gives the coats “more purpose and more wearability,” Dahan said.
Brands like Kanuk have to offer clothing that works across a shifting climate and appeals to a more budget- and style-conscious customer. “People want comfort, but with a good look,” Dahan said.
In Canada, a country defined by its winters, outerwear has become an uncertain market. The big parka isn’t going anywhere, but for retailers and brands alike, it’s no longer the centre of gravity. If winter ceases to arrive on time, the industry has no choice but to meet shoppers where they are: somewhere between a fleece-lined chore coat and a -30 C parka, waiting for the weather to make up its mind.
This article was written by Stanley Widianto and Panarat Thepgumpanat, and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 29, 2025.
The death toll from floods across large swathes of Southeast Asia rose to at least 321 on Friday, with authorities working to rescue stranded citizens, restore power and communications and co-ordinate recovery efforts as the waters began to recede.
Large parts of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand have been stricken by cyclone-fuelled torrential rain for a week, with a rare tropical storm forming in the Malacca Strait.
Another 46 people were killed by a cyclone in the South Asian island nation of Sri Lanka, authorities said.
On Indonesia’s badly hit Sumatra island, 174 people were confirmed dead on Friday, Suharyanto, the head of Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency, said at a news briefing.
While the rain had stopped, 79 people were still missing and thousands of families have been displaced, he added.
Residents in Sumatra’s Padang Pariaman region, where a total of 22 people died, had to cope with water levels at least one metre high, and had still not been reached by searchand-rescue personnel on Friday.
“We’re running out of supplies and food,” said Muhammad Rais, a 40-year-old resident who was forced to move to the second floor of his home on Thursday to escape the rapidly rising waters.
In the town of Batang Toru, in northern Sumatra, residents on Friday buried seven unclaimed victims in a mass grave. The decomposing bodies, wrapped in black plastic, were lifted from the back of a truck on to a wide plot of land as onlookers held their noses.
Communications remained down in some parts of the island, and authorities were working to restore power and clear roads that have been blocked by landslide debris, said Abdul Muhari, spokesman for Indonesia’s national disaster mitigation agency.
Indonesia would continue to airlift aid and rescue personnel into stricken areas on Friday, he added.
The Thai government said that 145 people had been killed by floods across eight southern provinces. It said a total of more than 3.5 million people had been affected.
In the southern city of Hat Yai, the hardest-hit part of Thailand, the rain had finally stopped on Friday, but residents were still ankle-deep in flood waters and many remained without electricity as they assessed the damage done to their property over the past week. One said he had “lost everything.”
Some residents said they were spared the worst of the floods but were still suffering from their effects.
“It affects everything for us, in every way,” said 52-yearold Somporn Petchtae. “My place wasn’t flooded, but I was stuck like I was on an island because I couldn’t go anywhere.”
In neighbouring Malaysia, where two people have been confirmed dead, tropical storm Senyar made landfall at around midnight and has since weakened. Meteorological authorities are still bracing themselves for heavy rain and wind, and warned that rough seas could pose risks for small boats.
A total of 30,000 evacuees remain in shelters, down from more than 34,000 on Thursday.
Malaysia’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday that it had already evacuated 1,459 Malaysian nationals stranded in more than 25 flood-hit hotels in Thailand, adding that it would work to rescue the remaining 300 still caught up in flood zones.
This article was written by Bill Curry and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 29, 2025.
Northwest Territories Premier R.J. Simpson met with Prime Minister Mark Carney and other ministers Friday on Parliament Hill to promote a list of potential projects for Ottawa’s new $1-billion Arctic Infrastructure Fund and Major Projects Office.
The Nov. 4 federal budget, which featured cover art of a cargo ship sailing through icy waters, said the four-year program will allow Transport Canada to fund projects in the North that have dual-use applications for civilian and military purposes, including airports and all-season roads.
Mr. Simpson met with Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon Friday but said the details of the program haven’t been finalized.
“They’re still figuring that out. I know they have thoughts behind it, but I told the minister today: ‘If you want to know what infrastructure we need in the territory, please come talk to us and that can help inform the development of the plan,’ ” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
In addition to the $1-billion fund, Ottawa has also referred proposals to a new Major Projects Office, which aims to streamline approvals and construction.
To date, no projects that are exclusive to the NWT have been included. However, the Major Projects Office is working on an Arctic Economic and Security Corridor.
Mr. Carney has described the corridor project as a new Arctic port and all-weather road infrastructure that could benefit Nunavut, the NWT and the Prairie provinces.
He said this could involve a new port at Grays Bay, Nunavut. The Grays Bay port project envisions a road link to the NWT.
Mr. Simpson said that region would also support major new mining development in what is called the Slave Geological Province Corridor.
The Premier said the region’s economic promise is on par with Ontario’s Ring of Fire, but with a less catchy name.
“I guess it’s the appropriate geological description of the area. But it doesn’t roll off the tongue, and so I liken it to the Ring of Fire, because it is an area that is very, very mineral rich,” he said.
The territory has highlighted three major projects for consideration as being in the national interest: the Slave Geological Province Corridor; an all-season Mackenzie Valley Highway and the Taltson Hydro Expansion project.
All three projects were mentioned on a federal draft list of 32 major projects obtained earlier this year by The Globe.
Mr. Carney was born in Fort Smith, NWT, and raised in Edmonton.
Mr. Simpson said he doesn’t have a close personal relationship with the Prime Minister, but it’s clear federal ministers have been urged to engage directly with the North.
“He has been very responsive,” he said. “He wants to see the North developed, not just because he was born there, but because he sees the potential.”
During a photo op at the start of their afternoon meeting, Mr. Carney specifically mentioned the Slave Geological Province Corridor, Mackenzie Valley trade corridor and Grays Bay port project as issues they would be discussing during the meeting.
“We have identified a series of very important infrastructure investments in the Northwest Territories that we’re working through,” Mr. Carney said. He described the Grays Bay port project as being “just outside” the NWT, “but very much that opens up opportunity within the North.”
This article was written by Jordan Omstead and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 27, 2025.
Blasts of frigid Arctic air could send temperatures tumbling in December and herald the arrival of a more “traditional Canadian winter,” a meteorologist for the Weather Network predicts as it releases its seasonal outlook.
Most of Canada is expected to see near or colder than normal temperatures, and near or above normal precipitation and snow, says the network’s seasonal forecast for December, January and February.
There’s still some uncertainty about whether the second half of winter’s fury will be widespread or more focused on Western Canada, said meteorologist Doug Gillham.
What’s more certain is that it will be “December to remember,” he said. The forecast isn’t necessarily calling for a “historically severe winter,” Mr. Gillham said, but “it’s going to be a colder December and January than we’ve really become accustomed to seeing in many recent years.”
“When you step back and look at big picture, winter will show up this year and it’s going to show up in a big way to start the season.”
The country experienced its warmest winter on record two years ago ahead of last year’s more typical season, Mr. Gillham said. This year is expected to look more like last year, “but the signals for cold are actually a little bit stronger,” Mr. Gillham said.
One of those signals is the polar vortex, strong winds circling up to 50 kilometres above the Arctic that keep frigid air locked near the poles. A period of surging temperatures up in that part of the atmosphere is expected to disrupt the vortex and spill that cold out over Canada in December and January.
A second consecutive winter with a weak La Niña is also set to have a cooling influence, Mr. Gillham said. The climate pattern, tied to shifting patches of water in the Pacific Ocean, can often lead to colder and stormier conditions across much of Canada.
Put those two things together, the disrupted polar vortex and the weak La Niña, and the potential goes up for extended stretches of extreme temperatures, he said.
“So, if you enjoy winter activities, that’s good news. If you think, ‘I don’t need snow tires any more,’ well, you may want to rethink that,” Mr. Gillham said.
What counts as a typical or normal Canadian winter has changed over recent decades. While they fluctuate, average winter temperatures are about 3.7 degrees warmer now than in the mid-20th century as climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, reshapes Canada’s winter way of life.
My Climate Change Website 